I know this may not be a popular discussion thread but I feel a need to express the disconnect I felt with the psychopath even during the most intimate moments....

My Psychopath used to close his eyes when he was making love to me which basically made me feel like a "thing" and not even there. There was no tender look, tender caresses or soul connection. There was a deafening quiet and absence of intimate pillow talk that connects souls as well as bodies. No compliments, no discussion, no playful interaction, just the act itself. In some ways I thought it was a comfortable silence of two people sharing deeply but that was just my projection. He felt nothing emotional while I was deeply in love with him and our expression through lovemaking. To him, it was a skin thing, further evidenced by his penchant for wanting to do it with the lights out. No need for eye contact or connection. Can only say this in retrospect. At the time I was pleased as can be that he was interested in pleasuring me but that became less important to him as the months rolled on. And then after I had the baby and weeks had passed he was disinterested. I know now because he was getting it somewhere else.....

OK, here goes: mine was an actor. The sex was phenomenal, for me at least. And I believed that he was "making love" to me, and me to him. That was probably the only marker of quality in the relationship. A few times I caught a hint of something that seemed off, just not right. When we did it at his place, I sometimes had intrusive thoughts, images of him doing it with someone else there. In the same chair or other spot. Although his actions were almost entirely loving with me, I had the sense that his pleasure was all in his head, that he was fantasizing about someone else as we did it, and that was what got him off. I thought he could have just lay there alone and gotten off just through fantasy. Once he told me that he actually could. I don't remember him always having his eyes either closed or open. One time he spoke to me in a language that I don't know. He said something about, "beautiful". Yes, that was a big, bright, red flag for me. When I asked him about it he denied saying it, and caught himself quickly. Yet when he said it, I had the sense of him being in another place, not really present with me. As I write, I am still tempted to think that maybe it was just my "own low self esteem" or mental weakness, or distrustful nature (that is what he would have written it off as). But then I remember that I was NEVER like this (suspicious) with any other partner. And I realize that the suspicion was caused not by some inherent flaw in me, but by his overall Psychopath dishonesty, and by the first time he betrayed me. After that, it was very hard to ever believe him again. Because he never really came clean about any of it,not the first one, and not any later ones. And I don't know the extent of his disloyalty the first time, but I do know now that he had intent to carry it out as far as he could, even to marrying her.

What made it so hard is that I bought into the lie so completely. I belived that since overall it was SO good, there had to be some love, some loyalty, something of value in our relationship. It couldn't possible be all bad, right??? Wrong. He was incapable of loyalty. That simple fact turned all the rest (anything that appeared to be good or true), into "mud".

He could get out of bed, walk three steps and and betray me without a second thought, and then lie about it. And he did.

I remember the first passionate kiss so many years ago, just like it was yesterday. Halfway through, he took a deep breath almost like a big sigh. I will never forget it and I asked him about it because my gut was telling me that he was bored or something. He said that he just needed some more air. Red flag. I ignored it.Then during our intimate times, he seemed to know so much about a woman's anatomy and told me all about it. Slowly over time, I was not allowed to face him anymore, had to be face down. If on the rare times I did get to face him, he always stared straight ahead at the wall or covered my face with a piece of clothing. The kissing, hugging and foreplay no longer exist either.

For the psychopath, sex is a stimulating obsession with him. Women in his life are just for his amusement and pleasure. The sex, at first, is all consuming and very passionate. Later on, he seemed to have gotten bored, like the thrill is in the getting and it is on to the next victim or else he cannot contain the beast in him or most likely at little of both.

If you look closely enough, you will notice the psychopath has an obsession with a certain part of the female anatomy, not really the person after the initial thrill as worn off for the Psychopath. Then, the physical part gets more and more bizarre.

He related his fantasy is about women covering their faces and being tied up. So, the mask slipped in his quest for a bizzare fantasy.

In the beginning though, while he is wooing you and the sex is great, he is still out there looking for his next victim---in the bars and on adult personal sites or in chatrooms, creating a persona of Prince Charming.

At first I thought I wasn't pretty or perfect enough for him, but then with the help of this forum, I now believe it isn't about me. It is about him. His wife can't satisfy him nor I couldn't satisfy him nor can any single women can---a bottomless pit of a sexual pervert always on the prowl for the next one. So, the more women know that he's out there, they can save themselves the emotional toll it as taken on his previous victims.

I wanted to add to the above story that the topic of sex had not been part of the earlier discussion which had set off psychopath's rage. That discussion had only been about our financial situation.

This is illustrative of some things: EVERYTHING was about sex to my psychopath. Any issue over which I struggled for some control was about sex to him. He told me, in later years, that he really viewed me as always attempting to control HIM. In his twisted view, if I sqirmed for any control over my own life, I was controlling him. I understand, now, that the psychopath believes he has the right to control everyone, and when his victim attempts to gain any control over her own life, she is wresting that control away from him. She has no rights. She does not actually exist, in his view. She is an extension of him. I believe that, for psychopaths, sex and control are all bound up together.

Psychopath used sex, from our beginning, to take away my autonomy. He violated me sexually by having sex with all my friends, neighbors, associates, so that I could not turn anywhere without being confronted by the sickening awareness of Psychopaths sexaul betrayals. He had sex with other women in my bed. He humiliated me, in all social settings by having sexually charged conversations with other women, in my presence, often stranding me somewhere with our babies, while he disappeared for hours, with one of these women.

I did not have a jealous or suspicious bone in my body when I met the psychopath. But, OF COURSE, I developed those traits. It actually took a long time, and tremendous effort on psychopath's part. I did not understand that behavior. Because it ran contrary to the wisdom of my heart, I remained innocent for a ridiculously long time. While psychopath was setting me up to become his invention, he constantly planted the concept, in my mind and the minds of all observers, that our problems were the result of my irrational jealousy and suspicion. This worked perfectly, in later years, when he had perfected his act so that he did not behave, in obvious ways, in front of others, but seduced women by pretending to be suffering from my irrational jealousy and control of him.

Psychopath turned every issue, in later years, into one about sex (and MY mental sickness about it). It did not matter if we argued over who was to get the water softener salt, psychopath turned the argument into one about my torture of him over sexual issues. This thing he had done to me became HIS absolute out.

When we went through a horrible time, while he was working for a mental health agency (a problem-ridden time which had NOTHING to do with sex), he was befriended by 2 female therapists on the staff. I asked him how he characterized our problems to them. He said, "I told them I made a few mistakes years ago, and that you have never been able to let it go."

Psychopath was the sole creator of this fiction. No matter how hard I tried to stay away from the subject, HE invariably brought it up within seconds of any conflict, "Now you're going to start telling me how I slept with all your firends. I can't take it anymore. I'm going to kill myself."

This speaks of 2 things to me, now. One is that psychopath contructed a reality in which he tortured me, sexually, while creating an illusion of the opposite, that I tortured HIM sexually. The other is that sex was his ultimate soul-destroying weapon. I have read that sexual abuse is absolutely the most damaging, that it destroys the souls of children (and I think it has the potential of doing that to adults, too). This makes sense because, when you think of sex, as an expression of love, in order for it to work, the person who loves has to surrender her being, her separateness, for a moment, and allow herself to fall backward, over something that feels like a waterfall. She has to relinquish control, abandon her boundaries. This can be a spiritual experience, and in its truest, purest expression, it IS a spiritual experience. Thus, sex can be a vehicle of ultimate healing power, or a vehicle of ultimate destructive power. It is a question of WHO and WHAT is in control in the moment that the woman (in this case) relinquishes control. I have no doubt that the psychopath recognizes (perhaps not consciously) the exploitative potential of sex as a weapon to destroy at the deepest level. Mine used it to breathtaking perfection.

kris

Now, I want to expand on the effects of psychopath's sexual torture. Because of his many affairs, and the way they were stuffed in my face, and his incessant fantasizing in my ear about sex with other women during sex with me, I became unable to have sexual feelings as myself. As myself, I was so bloody wounded by psychopath's betrayals that I could not experience erotic feeling without hellish pain so overwhelming it shut me down.

I was so, so, so determined to overcome "my problem" and continue to satisfy psychopath's "needs" that I never once allowed "my problem" to get in his way. Instead, I dissociated and became whatever woman psychopath was fantasizing about. In other words, I became the woman psychopath was cheating on me with, in my inner identity, my sexual identity. Inevitably, as I approached and crossed the threshold, that place where you let go of all control, and fall backwards (body falling, spirit rising), I ascended, not into paradise, but I descended into hell. That moment was rich with all of kris's agony, the recognition that I had just participated in another annihilation of my self, another soul murder, another debasement to the bottom of the world.

Sometimes, when we were not being sexual, I talked to psychopath about "my problem", very gently, hoping "we" could work on solving it together. Psychopath's most usual reaction was extreme self-pity. "Wow, that really hurts me to know that something that is so special to me actually hurts you. I don't know if I can get past that." (Poor thing to be so burdened by my problems.)

So, in sexual situations, I was careful to keep "my problem" to myself. Psychopath never noticed that I suffered a descension into hell at the big moment. And he might stop the fantasizing for a week, after a discussion, but he never stopped it for long. So I guess he was able to transcend my thoughtless burdening of him with my problems.

This speaks to what I was describing, in my previous post, that the psychopath is able to cause almost limitless destruction to his victim, to her soul, to actually take her soul to hell, repeatedly, through the weapon of sexual torture. And all the while he is doing it, he paints her as HIS abuser. She is always hurting HIM, not the other way around. The psychopath has all the exits covered.

So much of what you share in this post speaks to what happened with my psychopath too. I never viewed the open flirtations with other women in my presence as humiliating. I was hurt by it, but stuffed the pain/anger and just felt miserable about it. Now I realize that the hurt I felt was the pain of humiliation.

The next sentence stopped me cold: "As myself, I was so bloody wounded by psychopath's betrayals that I could not experience erotic feeling without hellish pain so overwhelming it shut me down"... Kris, I have gone and am still going through something like this too. I was aware of it, but am still not able to put it into words yet. I think when I realized this part was happening, I was amazed that I could be so F-d up emotionally, actually F-d OVER BY THE Psychopath, that even this aspect of my life would malfunction. Thank you for expressing it so clearly. I was with Psychopath for only 5 years total.

You wrote: "In the beginning though, while he is wooing you and the sex is great, he is still out there looking for his next victim."

This was the most difficult of his betrayals for me. It was when the relationship, if what he said was true, was totally perfect in every way. It was when I should have walked, and didn't. I guess the writing was on the all back then, and I chose to ignore it, and to believe his words instead.

One of my friends tried to tell me, and I was so twisted by then that I thought she wanted him for herself. (Duh!!! maybe she did, but it still would have been her loss and my gain to get rid of him.)

Anyway, I had never felt such pain as with that first betrayal, and some others that happened in the first 18 months. And I spent so much time trying to change myself so that he would become faithful. What a sick situation. Looking back, everything after the first 18 months was like rolling downhill. And I was in such a confused, hurting state all the time that I was almost numb to what happened later on.

Leti, I absolutely see this sexual abuse as the most vile, pernicious abuse in the psychopath's repertoire. I suffered every kind of abuse, emotional, physical, psychological, but the sexual abuse was, without question, the most agonizing and deeply, deeply damaging. Sexual abuse is abuse to every level of a person's being. It reaches into one's core humanity and poisons and destroys.

Sex, "intercourse", is a physical metaphor for spiritual intercourse. It is one of 2 acts in physical human life in which the boundaries of human separateness are penetrated, and it mirrors the spiritual concept of love. The other act is violence and murder, and this mirrors the spiritual concept of hate.

The psychopath is a vessel of hate masquerading as a vessel of love. Sex, to him, is a weapon of destruction, a hateful act, a means of penetrating to the victim's innermost being, and doing violence to her soul.

The victim cannot protect herself because the very nature of sex is surrender, opening the self, and surrendering it to the other.

The open flirtations with other women hurt because they humiliated you, and put your head down lower. You were being devalued. A man honors a woman with his sexual interest, if it well-intentioned and respectful of her as a person. When a man turns this interest on other women in the presence of his wife, he is saying he does not honor his wife with his interest...he honors another. The wife feels stripped of her value and ashamed to be who she is. Whether or not your husband is sexually happy and bonded with you goes to the core of your feeling about yourself, and your comfort within your own skin. I can remember feeling like I was covered in wads of loose squishy flesh from the feeling of the shame on my skin (and I wasn't, lol).

"The next sentence stopped me cold: "As myself, I was so bloody wounded by p's betrayals that I could not experience erotic feeling without hellish pain so overwhelming it shut me down"... Kris, I have gone and am still going through something like this too."

When your shame in your sexual identity becomes intolerable, you cease to occupy yourself there. You say you have this problem, and you were only with the psychopath five years. Leti, by the time I was with my psychopath five years, I was already waging war with this demon. I do think you have a shot at healing in this area. I do not believe I do because I stayed 25 more years. What has a possibility of working for me may be different for you. But I know I will never attempt sex unless I love a man with all my heart, and I am certain that he loves me the same. It's similar to mind over matter. Love over body may have a chance of prevailing. I am 50. I have not made love as myself since I was perhaps 23.

Please excuse me for signing in here, and up till now I didn't feel it entirely right to do so.

When my ex wife was a young wife, a new young wife, she used to smell like hell often. It was horrible. One afternoon we were to go up to her parents place. She turned up at the appartment, and she really looked her worst- lank greasy hair, oily skin, and of course smelling awful. I said, why don't you have a bath? She said- oh I'll leave it till we get there. And she did, so I got two hours driving with this hellish aroma in the car.

Shortly after we got there, her Dad made a comment about her appearance. I didn't hear what she said, but he turned to me with a funny look and said,"Yeh, you've got your man now". But then he repeated it with as hateful a look directly at me as I have ever seen. I swear it damned near knocked me down.

Long after that, when we were getting divorced, she told me about how she had had to go to school in extremely poor hygienic conditions. It occurred to me that her Dad had apparently liked her like that. And in going up in such a disgraceful state - married now - she was giving him the finger as if to say, here you are, now you can't have me.

To understand this appalling image you have to see a beautiful young woman, and a well off middle class home.

But she always liked him as far as I knew and saw. He was regularly in our home, in this country and that, always treating the undersigned with a just restrained enough contempt for me not to eject him.

The most odd circumstance of which I have ever heard happened to me. Just amazing. What a fool I was.

Laura, I know that if my husband had been like yours, he'd have had a true believer in me. That kind of focused sexual attention makes a woman feel so claimed, so wanted, needed, bonded. I had almost forgotten because of what life with my husband was like, but he was like that, in our beginning. Before we lived together, we spent entire weekends in bed. I remember him taking me back to his cabin for a weekend, driving over a bridge at 100 mph, then once in his house, turning me upside down and shaking me out of my hip hugger jeans because he couldn't get the zipper down fast enough. Having sex for literally hours at a time, rest briefly, start over. I had never had a relationship like that. I felt like he was starving and I was the only food on the planet.

His sexual humiliation of me began before we married. But the moment we were married, something else changed, too. His hunger for me. Suddenly, it was as if he'd always just finished a big meal, and I was cold spinach left on the plate.

I know what you mean about feeling raped after your husband expressed such need for you, and then abandoned you just 24 hours later. I felt some version of that, after being the tantalizing steak in a hungry man's eyes, and then reverting to cold porridge overnight. I well remember the feelings of confusion and rejection. What happened to you, in an instant, happened to me over 30 years. I gradually realized that the focused sexual attention had not been passion born of love. You realized it the moment you realized he had left just after expressing such need and passion. And it does feel alot like rape.